Thursday, April 28, 2016

Mercy mission gets Matzah shipped to Bahrain

Rabbi Leivi Sudak (photo: The Jewish Chronicle)

A Jewish businessman who had been helped by the Lubavitch movement while imprisoned in Iran 'returned the favour' when he assisted in getting emergency supplies of Matzah (unleavened bread) to Bahrain in time for the Passover seder. The Jewish Chronicle has the story (with thanks: Andrew, Nancy):

Bahrain's tiny Jewish community will have matzahs for Pesach after a mercy dash orchestrated by rabbis, a businessman and an MP.

A planned delivery of shmurahmatzahs went missing en route to the Gulf state earlier this week.
But after Chabad rabbis in London were alerted to the problem, a last-minute operation ensured the 50 Jews in the country would receive the unleavened goods in time for Seder night.

Edgware Lubavitch director Rabbi Leivi Sudak said: "We became aware there was a problem with their Pesach delivery, so we got to it. We quickly gathered supplies to send to them.
"We boxed up everything - grape juice, macaroons, tea, you name it."

"But when we asked FedEx how much it would cost they wanted £240 per box to send the stuff.
"It was just too much and they couldn't guarantee us delivery in time."

Hampstead Garden Suburb businessman Melvyn Kay used contacts in the freight industry to assist the rabbi in getting the products on to a Gulf Air plane which left London on Wednesday morning bound for the Bahrain capital, Manama.

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Introduction

In just 50 years, almost a million Jews, whose communities stretch back up to 3,000 years, have been 'ethnically cleansed' from 10 Arab countries. These refugees outnumber the Palestinian refugees two to one, but their narrative has all but been ignored. Unlike Palestinian refugees, they fled not war, but systematic persecution. Seen in this light, Israel, where some 50 percent of the Jewish population descend from these refugees and are now full citizens, is the legitimate expression of the self-determination of an oppressed indigenous, Middle Eastern people.This website is dedicated to preserving the memory of the near-extinct Jewish communities, which can never return to what and where they once were - even if they wanted to. It will attempt to pass on the stories of the Jewish refugees and their current struggle for recognition and restitution. Awareness of the injustice done to these Jews can only advance the cause of peace and reconciliation.(Iran: once an ally of Israel, the Islamic Republic of Iran is now an implacable enemy and numbers of Iranian Jews have fallen drastically from 80,000 to 20,000 since the 1979 Islamic revolution. Their plight - and that of all other communities threatened by Islamism - does therefore fall within the scope of this blog.)